


Controlled Substance

by executrix



Category: Blakes7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-04
Updated: 2011-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-21 01:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/219270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is both your heads, on drugs. Any questions?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Controlled Substance

1.  
When he was on Earth, Kerr Avon had various interests and avocations. Among these, two hobbies were by far his favorites: screwing and playing bridge. The two had a good deal in common.

Doing either of them really well invoked a significant element of skill, although only one of them had a publicly recognized point system to acclaim the masters. Each carried enough of an element of luck to make it interestingly unpredictable. Both of them were done with a partner who could be blamed for anything that went wrong. One difference was that Avon nearly always played bridge for money, whereas quite often he had sex just for the hell of it.

On Liberator, however, his problem, or rather one thread in the skein of his problems, was that Zen was the only one who could be arsed to learn how to play bridge, so there went any chance of putting together a decent foursome. For bridge at any rate.

Avon had heard vaguely of the ancient superstition that really, deep down, there are three of everyone. He was quite aware of the incessant equivalent of a flight deck argument that went on within him. For him, the surcease offered by a happily uninhibited sexual bout was the equivalent of slipping his superego a generous tip and telling it to take a couple of hours off.

That left him with nothing to deal with but his ego (which loved nothing better than to hear "I never felt anything like that before--_ever_") and his id (which was happiest when it was right beyond language, apart from the occasional "Oh Christ" or "_please, please, please_" which Avon often found himself saying when it was really too late to modify anything at all).

At the moment, he felt very much in need of surcease. In some ways, it was the low point of his life. (He was privately convinced that, if he had arrived on Cygnus Alpha as scheduled, within six months he'd have it all sorted and would more or less own the place. This was not the conclusion Blake had reached when pondering the same question.)

2.  
Blake came back to awareness, sprawled on the floor, feeling as if the marrow had been sucked out of his bones, at about the same moment as Avon got back from wherever the hell he had gone.

The inventory showed Blake that, apart from slight rug burns, he felt absolutely wonderful. His boots had never looked better. His trousers were very much the worse for wear. He even had faith that, sooner or later, he would once again be able to move under his own power. But at the moment, he felt as replete as a child of divorced parents confronting a plate of Granny's mince pies, right after having two Christmas dinners in a row.

Wherever the hell Avon had gone had running water: he carried two small plastic buckets with rope handles. One was magenta, the other was a viciously vivacious lime green. He carried a couple of towels draped over one arm. His shirt was neatly fastened in the front, but had been ripped into wide vertical strips at the back.

Avon wrung out a big, soft natural sponge in the magenta bucket--filled with hot water and soapsuds--and trailed it over Blake. He took a few moments to push the soapsuds around, which did less than nothing to actually tidy anything up. Then he wrung out the sponge in plain warm water from the other bucket, cleaned off at least a plurality of the soap suds, and patted Blake dry with the short cut pile of a cotton velvet towel. After some vigorous friction from the Turkish towel, Blake actually felt able to stand up and totter over to the bed to sprawl there instead.

"After all that effort, get these boots off me and put them in the wardrobe. You're up and about anyway, so have a look in the drawer with the shirts. There's a present for you," Blake said.

Avon folded the shiny paper wrapping the small flat box and put it into one of the desk drawers. Inside the box was a shirt made of fine, nearly sheer, off-white cotton batiste. "Thank you, Blake," he said noncommitally, looking at the front closure (eyelets and just about enough black velvet ribbon to rip out and secure his wrists to one of the eyebolts in which the cabin was surprisingly rich). At first Avon thought that the shirt had shoulder pads, but in fact it was a small strip of buckram in each shoulder seam that stiffened the puffed sleeves.

"No, you can't get a jacket over it, it won't fit." Blake said.

"Do you want me to try it on?"

"Not now. It's not for here. One day I'll make you wear out in public." Blake had already observed that Avon seemed most thrilled by the real or imagined exposure of what was kept hidden, and that an inevitable sign of impending orgasm was Avon's need to burrow his face into the pillows or any reasonable substitute.

Avon looked, with dire suspicion, at the low square neck of the shirt, and touched the side of his neck with two fingertips. A large area of fresh bruising overlapped a large area fading to yellow-green.

"You like me to mark you up, don't you?" Blake said with comfortable assurance.

"Mmmmm. Yes. Seeing the marks or feeling a bit sore the next day--well, it's like sending yourself a holiday postcard."

"I thought you were supposed to send those to your friends."

"Oh, that only makes them envious that they didn't get to go wherever it was."

3.  
As Avon saw it, Blake not only was a victim of a common misunderstanding, but had been subjected to a deliberate process of disinformation.

Avon often felt both sorry for and exasperated with the people he ended up in bed with. Jesus, what a life they must have led. Did all their past sexual partners expect a Worker Hero of the Federation medal for accelerated climaxes with minimized contact with their co-workers? Was there some central warehouse filled with caresses and moans, where every one withdrawn would be charged for with interest?

Were their past interactions so limited and parched that they lost the ability to distinguish between sensuality and empathy? Avon never minded being generous, when it cost him nothing, so he was more than willing to reciprocate pleasure. He thought it was a simple fact, scarcely worthy of acknowledgment, that he was good in bed. But why should anyone think that that made him nice?

4.  
Unhappy the land that has no hero, or that needs a hero--well, once you accumulate enough people to have a land they'll probably generate enough conflict to be pretty unhappy anyway.

Avon had a grain or so of sympathy for Jenna, whom he considered to be the only person on board doomed to go through life entirely sober and in her right mind. All the rest had some sort of anodyne to stupefy themselves with.

For Vila, of course, the abused substances literally were substances. Blake stayed aloft, giddy with the fumes of his cause. One might call that the prescription strength. Cally took the over-the-counter formulation and even Gan was regular in his homeopathic doses.

Avon would have considered Blake a very acceptable drug, whether taken by inhalation or injection. But sex was only a gateway drug. You could chip and dabble and then quit any time.

Many years before, Avon saw a poster put up by the Drugs Control Administration: "Shadow. It's so good, don't even try it once." At the time, he wondered if it was intended as a dire warning or a hard-sell advertisement. Later on, knowing what he did, he realized that in this case the two were quite indistinguishable.

Avon's mother had a scar on her arm. It hurt ever so much, she said. She got it making toffee. All that sweet stuff boils up and it sticks to you, you can't get it off, those are the worst burns.

Like a heavyset woman wavering in front of a pastry shop, a lush passing a bar on the way home, a Morality Enforcement Commission functionary at the door of a bordello, all swearing that they'd never go there again, Avon examined Blake's sleeping face. Then he realized that he was, so to speak, looking at the inside of the door.

Love. That shit can kill you.


End file.
